by Massive Voodoo

your MV-Team hopes you enjoyed the Christmas days like we did. Silent nights.
Your jungle blog is still on vacation mode and before we forget we want to wish all of you a

Happy New year 2017.

Look back to 2016 and think what was good about it, grief for what was sad and be happy for your moments of happiness. Every year is a mix of emotions, situations, moments, experiences. We wish that 2017 brings you what you wish for, a lot of painting time, but more important health, honest friendship and joy in your life. If you find things in you or in your life that you wish to change for the better, stop giving it a try. Just do it. When you just do it there are two options: either you fail or you do it. Both is something you can rely on, but trying is just something ... well, trying is not enough to change sometimes. A try will be a try. Be Jedi. Do or do not, but be aware what you do. Do it with all your senses.

There is one thing you can be sure about in 2017:
Massive Voodoo will be there for you in the new year, bringing you tons of articles, inspiration, ideas and finished miniatures.

Thirty-five tutorial- and step by step articles were written for you this year and we were really happy for your feedback on these. Thanks for voting and painting with us. We can promise yo another thing: 2017 we can not do another year of the painter, but we got different plans with all of you :)

Thanks
to everyone who took part in 2016's big MV contest, the MV's Mad Max Car Contest 2.
It was just so cool to see all your entries and we are already preparing a contest for 2017.
Stay tuned and energized for something truely inspirational!

Thanks to all our partners in collaberations, thanks to everyone who did buy a painted miniature from one of the MV-Team, thanks for everyone who comissioned one of the MV Team, thanks to every student who did visit a painting or sculpting or private coaching class in 2016.

What to expect from early 2017 here on MV:First of all a little radio silence from Roman's side as he is recharging a little, updating blog areas, preparing future articles, catching up with his mails, organising things behind the curtain. The other MV monkeys are always around, let's see if they monkey around enough to write something.

Roman so far can tell you that you can expect really interesting interviews from his side, cool miniatures unpacked, some exquisite painting articles and of course the review on MV's Jar's Beginners class in Herne, Germany. Stay tuned! _________________________________________________

Let's check back with our recent Christmas post!
Thank you all for posting so many comments, it was a true joy to read them, thank you for your honesty and all the joy you brought by putting your comment there!

Now it is time for us to find the lucky winner of our Christmas gift.
Roman's 2016 working matte, packed with magnificant painting powers, inspiration, creative madness and personal gorilla chaos on it. Additional with it goes the original Christmas Gorilla drawing you can see above.

We used random.org to find our winner and our random lottery winner is ...

...

...

is ...

ShyGuy

Congratulations, lucky you!Please get in contact with your MV Team via mv(at)massivevoodoo(dot)com to recieve information about the delivery and please sent your adress with this mail. You can also do this in 2017 as no monkey will answer before the year will change.

Roman writing a little Christmas Kong Fu:
Enjoy the more silent days of the year with friends, family and loved ones.

Looking at the world nowadays this is what the world needs. More calm minds, freedom, love and peace. Easier said than done. The winter holidays, including the celebrations of Christmas is a long history and even I am not a religious person at all I learned that there is one rule/religion everyone should live by to have a better world: Spread happiness in your circle of people you can reach. They will spread happiness too and the small circles one day will be bigger. Do not spread anger, hate, greed or envy. It one day will all come back to you.

It is not only Christmas time you should live this.
You can do this every single day in your life. Be nice to your neighbour, friends, family, community, homeless people, unknown people - take time to help others or even offer help in any case. Smile. Make someone else happy with maybe a small gesture. Be honest. To yourself. To others. Make decisions that do not hurt you or others, if need be speak clearly, directly and honest to make the one sitting with you understand your points of view. Grief honestly if need be. Make sure to know your weakness to be able to help others with the person you are. Think yourself in other persons shoes, before you judge them. Be more self-confident in spreading your good.

I rember reading the following tale/message/meaning
by Mario somewhere over the year 2016 on facebook and it stunned me - it is out of a book, nobody really knows and we are even unsure if it is really about a samurai - I write it in my own interpretation, but I am pretty sure you get the meaning :

A samurai gets approached by his students...
They want to know more secrets of life from him and he offers them a lesson, he is asking:

"If someone gives you a gift and you do not accept it. Who does the gift belong too?"

The students got to think a little, because it can be unpolite to not accept a gift, but their answer is:"If you do not accept the gift it will belong to the one who is delivering it. It is still his."
The Samurai answers:"Right, and it is the same when someone approaches you with anger, hate, envy and all bad emotions. You can accept them and make them a part of you too or you do not accept them and they will stay with the person who delivers them."

Well, this really stunned me and helped me a lot to be a better person. Just wanted to tell this again here. Now not to be ultra pathetic in here we also want to give one of our readers a very special ...

Massive Voodoo Christmas gift

My workbench is usually covered with two cutting mattes.
One new and shiny and the other one a mess of creativity. It grew over the year 2016 and now it is time for a new one. This old one is full of memories of me, I used it to draw, paint, write notes, do teaching examples, dozen of moments of happy painting with happy accidents and did dirty work on it.

Some might think, that I am giving garbage as a present here, but do not get this wrong. For me this is something very personal and maybe someone will hang it to his wall or even use it himself. Maybe there are happy painting energies hidden in it and they will influance you. Who knows. To the right corner it will recieve a personal dedication to the person who will win it.

The person who wins this will also recieve the original drawing of MV's Christmas Gorilla, done by me:

How can you win this?
Write a comment below this post, whatever you like, about Christmas, about Gorilla's throwing around Christmas trees, Harambe, cats, miniatures, icecream or your most impressive moment in 2016. Whatever you like. You can only do a "hello" if you are shy. Only one comment per person.

We will make a raffle from everyone who commented until 28th of December and one lucky person will recieve this Christmas gift out of the jungle of Massive Voodoo. It will be a late Christmas gift as we will ship it in the new year. Shipping is on us of course.

by Massive Voodoo

Hey Jungle,

well, well, well ... it is Christmas time here in Germany and many other places on this world.
Again. This went fast.

The jungle of Massive Voodoo will be in vacation mode until the new
year, but before we say officially goodbye we will have some cool
content for you, just before Christmas.
Call these posts Christmas gifts ...

This will be a small sum up and final additions to this years MV's year of the painter 2.
If you want to keep track with an overview on what has happened so far in
MV's year of the painter 2 please check this link!

The one for today is Roman's article speaking about"Step by Step - Blood Bowl Base".

Roman is now taking over the article.
We hope you enjoy.

Hello Blood Bowl fans, players and cheerleaders,

this article today will be precise and fast.Just like a good Blood Bowl tackle :)

That grass matt is included in Busch's Small animal sets.
I never found good use for it. Always disliked it in all the boxes I opened up for via my Beginners Class. Now I found it reason to exit. It is perfect for Blood Bowl bases, but I am pretty sure, that if you can not get your hands on this you find something similar, in fact it is about the idea.

Cut a small piece that kind of fits your base.
Use plenty of superglue. Medium one. Thin one will run everywhere and you hate it. Thick one is just too thick.

Use a toothpick to push it around so all areas are covered, take care for the edges, don't push over, but still try to hit them or you will later on have the issue that I will have :D

Put both together, not with too much pressure in the beginning, or you will push out the glue to the sides of the base, but slowly more pressure and then turn it around and let it dry.

When dry, cut the edges rough and then precise.

Use water on your base. Make the base wet.

Use some other green colors and drop some into the watery base.

Depending on the look for your Blood Bowl field you can now also add some browns and greens, washes in this case. My base is a wet mess right now.

Wait about 15 minutos and let most of the water on your base vaporize. Go back to the base when it is still wet, but not soaked. Use pure, thick white paint and draw your white line. It will not look like pure white as it will connect with the wet colors on your base. The reason why we waited for most of the water to dry: If we would not have waited the whites now would run everywhere.

I did not use proper superglue on the edges and I though about using a blade to cut off a part I did not like and ripped it off, because I was missing superglue here and everything was soaked up with water.

Everything happens for a reason and I took soil and placed it on some areas on the base. Of course mainly to hide the damage I did to the base. I used a brown wash on top of the dry earth and of course I glued it with superglue.

When everything was dry, absolutely dry. I used a brighter green color and drybrushed it over the grass parts of the base.

I did this again with even brighter green.

I washed the white stripe with browns and greens, before I used pure white again to mark it out again, drybrushing. I created a splatter of blood and painted my base edge black.

Done.

Subject tackled :)

Keep on happy painting!
Best Wishes
Roman

_______________________________________________________________________________You want to support Massive Voodoo? If you like to support or say thanks the monkeys of Massive Voodoo in what they do, please feel invited to drop a jungle donation in their direction via paypal or check their miniatures they got on sale here.
_______________________________________________________________________________

by Massive Voodoo

Hey Jungle,

well, well, well ... it is Christmas time here in Germany and many other places on this world. Again. This went fast.

The jungle of Massive Voodoo will be in vacation mode until the new year, but before we say officially goodbye we will have some cool content for you, just before Christmas.
Call these posts Christmas gifts ...

This will be a small sum up and final additions to this years MV's year of the painter 2.
If you want to keep track with an overview on what has happened so far in
MV's year of the painter 2 please check this link!

The one for today is Roman's article speaking about"how to pack your miniatures for shipping, the right way".

2.0Roman is now taking over the article. We hope you enjoy.

This article is called 2.0 as I already wrote an article about this topic some years ago. You can find it here. In the meantime, more experiences were made and I want to take you on a tour on how I pack my miniatures if I got to ship these delicate beauties with postal service.

First rule when shipping models:Always pray to the gods of save shipments.
Second rule:Ship prepared and well thought.

At the end of this figure painting season, after Monte San Savino Show I had to prepare a lot of shipments of figures I sold during the year. Many thanks to everyone who supported me in my art, passion and work and many thanks for all your patience in this. As always I prepared myself well and tried to have everything ready for the big packing days.

Models and Tupperware. Why this?

I use Tupperware that I try to buy cheap via Amazon. Sometimes they got really good offers. I try not to buy unsturdy Tupperware as it has a special tasks when I ship my models. I'll explain soon. Check for different sizes to pack different sized projects.

Now let's pack one model together.

Bubble wrap is placed around the model.

It is now tightened up with using tape.

Make sure you take care and know your model well. Do not use too much pressure.

This will now be placed in a plastic box that fits the model well. Leave some space, to be filled with sponge parts I was collecting over the year from different models.

The space I left, will now be filled with the sponge parts. I take good care that the models plinth is to the lower area of the box and everything fits well, tight, but not too tight. It should not move easily. Again now your model well and take care not to break something.

Also check the content's height in the box.

You know you want to place its lid on top.

I do place a business card, little candy fun and some stickers in the parcel too.

It can look different from parcel to parcel, depending on what I got to pack. Here four 28 mm models.

I then place the lids on all prepared boxes. Mark them with the name of my customer or the model inside. This is important to not ship the wrong model to its destination. As I am a big Batman fan I also place a Batman sticker on my parcels. Packed by Batman.

Then I take these plastic boxes inside the box I want to sent with. And stuff everything around it with stuffing stuff.

Then I wrap it up.

While I pack, I also repaint plinths black which might show damage due travels to figure events.

While I pack I take my time. Well it is taking its time by the task I got to do. Therefor I try to choose nice spots in the studio with a good view while focusing on the packing.Make sure you have enough space to handle everything simoultaniously without searching too much fur stuff while you are focusing on the task ahead of you.

Nice.

Do I like packing miniatures?
Frankly no. It is hard work if you want to do it good, but hard work often pays off and such many boxes ready to their new homes makes me feel happy and proud at the end of the day.Batman stickers for the win.

I actually hate shipping models,
but it is part of my job. All I can do is to make the journey as easy for the miniature inside as possible. That means taking as much care as needed to feel "ok" when you bring the parcel to the post office, where the really wild journey for the model begins.

Also think about customs, depending where you ship. They might open up your parcel and want to have a look inside. Tell them to be careful, just in case.

And then pack some more, because it is so much fun :)

I hope this article can help and inspire to find your own way to ship your models with maximum protection. I still can not garantuee a 100% save shipping with this as you never know what happens with the parcel when it meets up with many others of its kind, maybe a big guy will fall on it, because he is drunk on Christmas. You never know, but well try to avoid shipping models in Christmas time. They get lost more easier in that postal chaos. Try to ship several weeks ahead of Christmas.

by Massive Voodoo

Hello Jungle,

MV Roman visited Alfonso Giraldes aka Banshee in his studio in Madrid.
Roman planned to do a big interview with Alfonso, but the main question appeared and plans changed. Also the video is in low res. Roman failed while cutting and rendering it, but be sure the big talks will happen in much better quality. Stay tuned for 2017.

by Massive Voodoo

The winner of last weeks tutorial voting is dropping in today. Sorry for the delay, but we think everybody will be happy to the see the article.

You did vote last week here on the jungle blog and it was a close call, but finally the little Hobbit did find his way. The winner with only one vote is:

Find your way!

As a little Christmas gift we will skip tutorial voting this week and you will just see the article about packing miniatures without voting for it. Cool, eh?

If you want to keep track with an overview on what has happened so far in
MV's year of the painter 2 please check this link!
_______________________________________________________________________________You want to support Massive Voodoo? If you like to support or say thanks the monkeys of Massive Voodoo in what they do, please feel invited to drop a jungle donation in their direction via paypal or check their miniatures they got on sale here.
_______________________________________________________________________________

this article takes you through my thoughts while painting this bust by Midnight Miniatures.
I really fell in love with the sculpt by Lucas Pina, a hobbit, smiling and ready to follow his wanderlust. A beautiful sculpt with no weaponry, no brutality, but still tons of character and mystique magic.

To let you know on what we are talking about, here is my finished version:

For an unprecise size comparision you can check back with the bust and my hand ...

The Painting Process
In this article you will find - again - different photos of different quality. I took these some months ago while switching my mobiles, so some of them are really ... uhm, not so good.

My focus in this article will be - again - not a step by step guide and color guide, but a try to grab a wider thought on why he turned out like he did. These days it is really hard for me to give you exact or precise color recipes. Why you might ask? Well, I am starting all my paintjobs from primary colors and black and white on my wetpalette and mix every color I need on demand. So there can not be a color recipe of a specific Vallejo or Citadel Color as I am not using them.

This is where I start, with the purple and greenish yellow I just play around, the rest is primary colors from Schmincke Primeacryl.

I know that some of you now might ask, Roman - please explain more on your mixing process and be sure I will do in future articles, but still I need to understand everything myself through more painting hours before teaching more. And it is not subject of this article.

Subject is the little Hobbit ...
I primed him with black GW Primer, followed by spraying an olive bright green you can still see on the plinth's wood all over the place. Then I placed my basic color decisions via the brush and also placed first shadows here and there. If you look close on the color I used for his shirt (not the vest) you can see that even I aiming to paint white I am not starting with white. I used a tiny drop of green and grey in my basic color for this. Why? I can only recommend my article on painting white to you.

That was a quick jump into the first steps right and I can promise you that the full article will be a wild ride into my brain. I bet there are some thoughts who are helpful for some of you.

Sorry for the blurry photo.

As the photo is so megablurry I decided to take the next one with the bigger camera. I already did some more steps. Mainly focused on the face. First highlights and where painted in the skintone, careful glazes of red here and there and I had to paint the eyes. This face drew so much of my painting attention as the character who appears there is just too lovely.

On this photo you can also see that green is mixed in the basic color of the hair, the leather and well, yes everywhere to connect the model properly in the atmosphere I am seeing him in.

The hobbit's eyes.

My old mobile did really weird photos, when it comes to colors.

Upper photo, in the back you can see how my wetpalette gets a mess from mixing what I need.Believe it or not right now it is hard for me to explain in words what is happening there.I focus back on the hobbit and can tell from the bottom of my heart that I enjoyed this smiling face on my workbench.

Allright, after the work on the basecolors and the kickstart on the face it was time to spent some time to on all the other areas. As I am working a lot with texture recently I can show you different versions of texture I am working with. On the clothings and fabrics you can see thin lines that follow the direction of the fabrics. On the leather and map part you can see some random dotting that was achieved with using my uncleaned airbrush, basicly this is mainly colors spits. Nothing to clap your hands for, but I am enjoying this way so much.

Spitting and slapping paint to the map and leather. And by happy accident to a lot more areas.

Very important for me in this stage was a black and white photo I did. It tells me about the seperation between the busts elements. Color hues are not too close to eachother to get lost in terms of readability. Well, the hair is quite close to the skintone though.

The leather texture went a little crazy, call it wild. Slaps of brown orange and yellowish browns appeared here and there with wild brushstrokes and -slaps, before the airbrush spitting did the rest to make the chaos complete, but where you find chaos you can clean up.Spitting and sparkling with the airbrush. Lines for fabricwhile highlighting.Now it is turning white in the highlights. I was working my may to pure white over adding more and more white to my basic color.

Again he smiles at me between pure brutality and a pride army general ... and strawberrys.

All in all the most important message in this article that I want to point out is the vision you should have when starting a project. Mine was truely in a green environment. I made a quick sketch, but your imagination could take you further into a deep forest or field of spring grass.

With this color vision in the back of my mind I pushed further in the painting process. More detailed, edge highlights, clean up transitions here and there, but still I took care to have the green influance it all.

The map recieved some landmarks the little hobbit can follow on his journey. I mean if you go out for a journey it is always good to know where you are heading. X marks the spot. Maybe that is his friends tavern or barbecue party, who knows. It's all in your head.

In the upper photo and the one below you can see the quick sketch I made on the glass bottle. Slapadislap! Sketch.

Cleaned up the dotty mess from spitting color with painting highlights on the different material on top of it. The leather parts recieved a little detail love in their shadows by glazing in dark black browns, with brighter colors I worked with the texture that appeared due my wild approach. Did the metal parts black at this stage too.

Final work took me quite some time and was mainly about increasing detail. Sharper edge highlights, a little push in a highlight here and there. Finally painting the hair, that I did not like to touch earlier.

Darklining here and there. See backpack, plus the area where the leather parts meet the fabrics and where fabric meets fabric. This is important as it seperates different materials in detail and makes the model more readable for the viewers eyes.

Painted the metal parts, but in a simple way as they are no focus on this sculpt.
Painted the bottle to finish with searching for inspiration on wine bottle paintings via google and painted what I saw there. It is always good to check back with inspiration and how others painted something. Still the green is visible everywhere, right? In the hair, backpack, white fabrics, skin.

Green will influance it all if your vision is a green environment.

Still a black and white photo in the end also makes me see the seperation of areas I was aiming for. I got bright hues of colors, medium ones and dark ones. The setup here is nothing I would call perfect as for my part, still skintone and hair is a little bit to similar in the hue of the color choices.

Well, I really enjoyed that smiling fella a lot. It painted itself.I am still not sure in the end of the hair color, but I kept it as this guy reminded me of one of my godchildren, somehow ... when he will grew up.

Remember, when you start painting a project and you want to put love in your piece, think first about where the model is, what he/she is doing, even it is only a bust. You will think yourself in his/her shoes and this is always a good thing to do to understand many things in life.

I can highly recommend to paint this bust. He smiles at you all the time and the only two things you can do in return is smile back and paint.

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Welcome to the Jungle...

... MASSIVE VOODOO’s jungle, where some apes share their thoughts and ideas around their beloved passion, the hobby of miniature painting and sculpting.

Feel welcome to come and check the jungle for tons of articles, interesting tutorials, creative competitions and the simple joy of happy painting hidden behind every tree. We hope that everyone finds their own banana in here, if not do not hesitate to ask the apes. We are more than happy for you to post in the comments section to help turn this jungle into the lush, overgrown painting corner we hope it will become.